6 mo. ago • 96%

Here’s How That Disney 360° Treadmill Works

hackaday.com Here’s How That Disney 360° Treadmill Works

One thing going slightly viral lately is footage of Disney’s “HoloTile” infinite floor, an experimental sort of 360° treadmill developed by [Lanny Smoot]. But how exactly does it …

85 comments

Really interesting video. I can imagine playing an MMORPG where you get around by actually walking and running. Suddenly the biggest computer geeks would be super fit.

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- like when the collective world went outside at the same time when Pokemon Go launched. Our quiet downtown area was amazing to walk through. all those people.
  
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  Kind of a shame that the pandemic was so soon after. I wonder how much it affected the game's popularity.
  
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- Summer 2016 were my healthiest few months..
  
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  “Oh?”
  
  The world was at peace for those few months.
  
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- Just think how annoying it would be if like the best players in the world were only good because they were literally Olympic sprinters and just ran literal circles around you in a fight lol
  
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  Too much realism?
  
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  More realistically, it'd be nerds who found a way to hack or cheat their controller to give them ridiculous speed, lol
  
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  C'mon, leave it fatty
  
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- Unikely.. Kinda why VR also didnt get too popular, most players just prefer "classic" controls and not movement-controls.
  But this is huge for VR and other usages of this, probably even useful for production routing, but i dont have any knowledge of that.
  
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  Personally I'm surprised that there are so few non-full-body-movement games. It's amazing to sit down and play whatever game in a completely different 3D world. Moss is a great platformer in VR, pinball games are really cool in VR, and driving sims with a wheel and pedals kick absolut ass in VR. I bet games like FIFA, NBA, NHL etc would be amazing, top down car games would be amazing etc etc.
  
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- Speedrunners must be able to speedrunning irl.
  
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  I've recently been thinking about what I am calling double or compound walking where you walk with both the joystick and your real body for potentially combined movement speed. I don't have enough room to verify if it works in any games but after I move I have a decently long hallway I could test it in. My thinking is to work around the abysmal stamina in the vr games I've played so far and weirdly slow movement speed.
  
  The holotile would probably need some way to pass its tracking to the game if that was being used though.
  
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Make it 10x bigger and 3x faster and you’re halfway to having a holodeck.

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- I don't think it needs to be much bigger for an individual, just fast enough to keep them near the center even at a run. Smaller pads will be the way to go, just have to drive and control them in sync. Maybe predictive software to only run where your feet are at or will be, to minimize the noise.
  
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  I’d imagine running puts a lot more wear on the moving parts :/ It’s gonna have to be pretty reliable
  
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  I think you'd still need more size to account for longer strides and standing jumps.
  
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- Disney has their own version of Epic's "Volume" I believe, which is also very holodeck-esque
  
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- I swear I invented this when I was 10…glad the tech has finally caught up.
  
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  You came up with the idea of a multi-directional treadmill, or came up with the implementation using spinning/tilting disks?
  
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Wait, pretty sure I saw this demonstrated by a small startup almost 20 years ago.

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- Pretty sure companies like that get bought by companies like Disney...
  
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  Disney also employs badass engineers they call ‘imagineers’. I got contacted by recruiting for that but didn’t have enough personal just for fun creative engineering projects in my portfolio to land it
  
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- That one (assuming it's the same as your memory) was basically just a concave dome and you wore like socks. This seems pretty different.
  
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  The one I remember looked almost exactly like this.
  
  It was pretty exciting to see, thought for sure it would take 10 years to come to market. That was about 2008 ish.
  
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I wonder what it feels like to lay down naked on this thing and have it spin you around.

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- Pinchy.
  
  Also, hair-pully.
  
  Edit: oh god imagine running fast on this thing then falling over with long hair. scalped
  
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  Somewhat unrelated but that happened to me once on an escalator as a kid - I had very long hair when I was a young girl, and I went to the mall with my mom. I was on a department store escalator and suddenly felt my hair being pulled towards one of the sides/handrails. My mom noticed pretty quick, thankfully, and was able to yank it out before anything happened besides me being terrified as fuck.
  
  That was decades ago and I still remember it vividly. Thanks for the PTSD flashback, lol
  
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  The inventor is balding, so you might be right!
  
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Seems like it might be helpful to prevent people from escaping the work prisons we’ll all be toiling in one day. 🤣

(Was that too dark?) Super-cool tech, though. 👍

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- This is totally going to be a Black Mirror episode.
  
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- "they" would probably opt for more efficient robots and just let us poor people die/kill each other
  
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- It just makes me think of the scenes in the Ready Player One movie when they're in the place with all the people in debt to the company who are trapped on something like this to be forced to work in VR for the company.
  
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Has vibes of the omnidirectional treadmill from Ready Player One. Sweet.

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A company called Virtuix already developed a treadmill like this called the Omni like 10 years ago. They have released a few home versions of it and some larger ones for arcades. They're still refining it for mass production it seems.

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- The working principle is different though.
  
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- That is nothing like this one really.
  
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- The Virtuix unit looks really uncomfortable, and this one doesn’t require a harness, because it returns you to center
  
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- Pretty sure that was basically a plastic bowl you slide around in your socks on.
  
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I just imagine myself getting stuck, unable to walk off, perpetually walking in place.

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Sounds like were pretty close to Ready Player One?

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I'm hopeful this is further developed and licensed out. I'd love to have one of these setup at home as part of a VR rig

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Seems like it would only work for objects with large, flat bottoms—if you tried to use it barefoot it would likely rip your toes off.

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- This is just a crude early version. Eventually the tiles will be significantly smaller, quieter, and less prone to ripping toes off.
  
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  But the Toe-ripping is a major selling point!
  
  Do you have any idea how much it’ll cost to reprint all those pamphlets?
  
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  I wonder if a layer of Ripstop over the tiles would reduce performance. I could imagine fabric being a less expensive option than R&Ding more proprietary tech like making the tiles even smaller.
  
  Edit: Glossed over the fact the tiles rotate. Nevermind me.
  
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- Why would you try to use it barefoot??
  
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  That was just an example—it might also be a problem for shoes with heels, or textured soles, or people with feet too small to cover enough disks at once.
  
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Something I don't quite get: it seems like this would grind the shit outta any surface it comes in contact with (or, be ground to shit if whatever's on it is harder than the material of the cone thingies).

Does anyone have any idea how the constant abrasion is mitigated? Or is it somehow just not that big a deal, like it doesn't actually chew chunks outta (for example) shoe soles?

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- Spent a lot of time with engineers, but am not one myself. Most grinding discs and things that wear stuff down have a surface made to rip in, and higher opposed friction. Think sandpaper, it digs into a surface with those hills from the grit, and uses the friction to then drag through cutting the surface and removing material.
  
  With this floor, it looks like the wheels are smooth, so all though there's some friction, it isn't a cutting action. There's also the fact that their friction is unopposed and can actually move the person, so the energy gets converted into movement, not the cutting force that would grind things down.
  
  They really are just tiny treadmills, the only reason they're discs is so they can be tilted to change the direction the "treadmill" is going to push you. If the disc is tilted to the right, the left most edge is going forward, if the disk is tilted to the left, that right edge is moving backwards. Otherwise exact same principle as a treadmill of creating friction to move the object on it.
  
  Hope that helps some. Diagrams would probably help more.
  
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- If you ever run barefoot or in socks on a regular treadmill, you'll feel that it's a little bit rougher than just walking around normally. But it's still not enough to really make noticeable wear on shoes (any more than normal running on pavement is).
  
  Basically, shoe soles are specifically made to be pretty tough, so this type of treadmill shouldn't be worse than normal.
  
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- It doesn't grind anything basically the same way a treadmill doesn't sand anything. You're not forcing anything to stay put on the surface, you're maneuvering on the surface while the surface is counter-moving you.
  
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  MKBHD's video shows it moving him around on a chair, spinning the chair, etc etc. In the closeup shots, it looks like there's debris on the surface of the cone thingies:
  
  The debris isn't uniform and is quite obviously not part of the roller material; I just kind of assumed that it was from stuff they'd been testing on it, though I suppose it could be generic workshop crud that fell on the rollers too 🤷
  
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- What... they aren't spinning at high speeds and "grinding" the surface that's on them. They only spin as quickly as they need to move the surface. Imagine a treadmill, it's not going quicker than you are running on it, your shoes never slide on the surface, same here.
  
  I really don't understand how you have misunderstood this so badly.
  
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  If you watch MKBHD's video, you see him spinning himself around on a chair. The chair legs are in constant contact with some part of the cone thingies while they're rolling, which means friction, which means wear. I posted a screenshot from MKBHD's video in another response that shows what looks like debris all over the surface of the cone rollers; the debris is not uniform and is quite clearly not part of the roller material (I put a screenshot in the reply to another comment, so I'll just link it here), so I assumed that it was from testing the treadmill with various objects.
  
  As well, there was no need to be a dick about it.
  
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MKBHD did a video on this. Pretty interesting. https://youtu.be/1KEtxTQUzxY

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- The video is linked in the article
  
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- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://piped.video/1KEtxTQUzxY
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  3
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  
  https://piped.video/1KEtxTQUzxY
  
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  1

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